Reading Recommendations My first serious physics textbook was given to me as a gift at the Canadian Physics Olympiad Team training camp. The book, Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday et al, is outstanding in both clarity and coverage for advanced high school students and first year undergraduates. I came across Dan Kleppner and Robert Kolenkow's An Introduction to Mechanics while browsing through the physics library at Argonne National Laboratory. Without it I don't think I would have ever understood classical mechanics properly. Other gems from my personal library include Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi and Quantum Mechanics by Cohen-Tannoudji et al. In the field of ultracold atoms and quantum gases, none of the expensive hard-cover references are as useful as Daniel Steck's Quantum and Atom Optics and Jook Walraven's Elements of Quantum Gases, both of which are available online thanks to the openness of the authors. Although I wish I could recommend the series by Landau and Lifshitz, I cannot do so before actually reading and understanding more of it - but suffice it to say this epic series has offered astonishingly rigorous perspectives on countless urgent research problems. When not reading about physics, I tune in to happenings around the world by trying to get through past issues of The New Yorker scattered around both home and office. Among many great things about The New Yorker, its stories stand apart compared to the demagoguery and sensationalism of most other media outlets. New Yorker stories are "news" not because they burst onto the scene barely minutes ago and will just as quickly fade from relevance, but because they are stories that have not been told before, that are worth reading for the way they challenge assumptions, imagine new possibilities, offer glimpses of realities we would not otherwise have known, and more... I should point out that this is not unlike how the Christian church considers its own stories, about a crucified man from two thousand years ago, to be good "news." Some of the best recent New Yorker stories include The Enforcer, The Cost Conundrum, Travels in Siberia, The Mark of a Masterpiece, The Apostate, The Dissenters, The Gulf War, Climbers... and then there is, from way back and in a class of its own, Hiroshima. This makes a nice segue into highlighting some books that have shaped my understanding of who Jesus is and what it means to follow him. Of the four gospel accounts of Jesus, the Gospel of John is the one I've spent the most time reading. One of its strongest themes is that of "truth," with Jesus many times starting a sentence with "I tell you the truth," suggesting that what he has to say will confront existing worldviews with a fuller reality. Other important books that draw out the implications of this include, in no particular order, What's So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey, The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright, The Great Divorce by C.S Lewis, For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann, and Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola. On the opposing end of the worldview spectrum, I had the opportunity to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I cannot recommend it, however, because it reads like an angry rant rather than a thoughtful articulation of the writer's perspective, and moreover the caricature of the Christian worldview it targets in particular for demolition bears little resemblance to the one I know. Finally, while this is not technically "reading," Vinoth Ramachandra's recent talk at the Veritas Forum was remarkable.